Colorado athletic director Rick George spent Monday night in New Jersey watching LeBron James play basketball along with some CU donors and Prince William and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge.
On Tuesday night, George attended the National Football Foundation’s annual awards dinner in New York.
No matter where he is these days, George’s thoughts are never far from two goals, continuing to raise money for the athletic department’s facilities project and helping his football program win more games.
After taking a week to digest the CU football season in its entirety, George shared his thoughts on Year Two of the Mike MacIntyre coaching era in Boulder and his expectations going forward during a telephone interview with the Camera.
Earlier this year, George, in conjunction with a group of advisers numbering more than 30, set a goal for the football program to reach a bowl game in 2014. That goal along with others for every program in the department were published in George’s long-term strategic plan. The football team obviously fell well short of that goal, finishing 2-10 and winless in the Pac-12 Conference.
“The season didn’t go as I expected it to go,” George said. “I expected us to win more games than we did. We did make improvements in a lot of ways, but at the end of the day we need to win football games and we’ve got to improve on that.
“We’ve got to continue to focus on how to get better and translate those close losses into close wins. We’ve got to win football games.”
More than half the teams in major college football are spending part of December practicing for bowl games while the Buffs are focused on next year. The Buffs haven’t been to a bowl game since 2007 and haven’t produced a winning season since 2005 under former coach Gary Barnett. CU is on its third coach since firing Barnett at the end of the 2005 season.
Losing seems to beget losing in college football, where there are no first-round draft picks and the best young players generally choose to join the programs that are already thriving. Consider that next year’s small CU senior class will face other seniors on the field who have been to bowl games in each season of their college careers. That translates to those seniors having 40 to 50 more practices than the Buffs by the time next season begins.
It’s an uphill fight George is all too familiar with from his days as a player at Illinois in the 1980s and then working to help build the CU and Vanderbilt programs in the 1980s and 1990s.
George, like MacIntyre, says he believes the Buffs are on the cusp of learning to win. He said the only way for them to finally get over the hump is to make it happen the next time they are in a close game. Part of doing that is the preparation for that opportunity over the next nine months.
The Buffs open the 2015 season on the road at Hawaii in September in the first game of a 13-game slate that will include the annual rivalry with Colorado State in Denver, nonconference home games against Massachusetts and Nicholls State as well as Pac-12 home games against Oregon, Arizona, Stanford and USC. The Buffs travel to play Arizona State, Oregon State, UCLA, Washington State and Utah.
“I think it’s doing it,” George said. “It’s a fine line. I’ve played it, I’ve coached it, I’ve been around it, and you’ve got to win, and once you get that win a bunch of wins will pile up on it. We point to Hawaii now and say that’s when we got to start it off and that’s when we’ll start our winning ways.
“It’s like anything else, once you experience it, more often than not it becomes habit. We’ve got to win that first football game and then start building wins behind it and get confidence. They’ve got to make plays when they need to and do the things necessary to win.”
George said both he and CU coaches will take time in the coming weeks and months to evaluate the season further and look at what can be done to help push the program toward better results. George said he believes he has the right coach in place to get the job done.
“”We knew this wasn’t going to happen overnight,” George said. “We made progress in the way we competed but we still haven’t won the football games that we need to. So, do I have confidence in Mike MacIntyre? Yes. Do I think he’s the right guy for the job? Yes. Do we need to look at things that we’re doing? Absolutely. And we’ve got to fine-tune them so that when we go into spring ball and when we go into the fall, we’re addressing the areas that we need to address for 2015.”
Kyle Ringo: ringok@dailycamera.com, twitter.com/kyleringo